The present invention relates generally to the field of remixing and playback of sound recordings and more particularly to such remixing and playback using tools designed for social networking and other websites on the Internet.
Individuals are increasingly turning to sites on the World Wide Web (the web) for information, shopping, entertainment, communication and community. Fast growing social network services such as MySpace and Facebook offer those individuals an outlet for expressing themselves to selected friends or to the world at large. Such websites and web services allow users to customize their personal profile pages by posting text, images, audio and video. Such social networking services also permit users to embed mini-web applications of their choice known as web widgets in personal profile pages. Web widgets allow users to further customize a personal profile page, blog, website, etc. by extending the functionality of the web widget to the personal profile page, blog or website. Web widgets related to music such as the iLike™ web widget from iLike, Inc. permit users to play clips of music they like on their Facebook personal profile page, show concerts they are attending and play a music trivia quiz.
Traditional ways of permitting consumers to experience music include making available copies of music in physical or digital form, live performances by the musicians, public performances of the music in nightclubs by disk jockeys, or karaoke machines in karaoke bars or at home. Due to a variety of factors, including difficulty in preventing unauthorized distribution of digital copies of music, there exists a need to engage consumers with music in new ways. One such new way of permitting users to experience and discover music include use of a web widget such as the iLike application referenced above, but such web widgets have the significant disadvantage of being static representations of music. A user who would like to hear a rearrangement of a particular song must wait until the record label releases a remixed version of the song.
In U.S. Pat. No. 7,078,607, Alferness proposed software tools for recording engineers to specify where in a particular song alternate recordings of an instrument (for example, alternate guitar solos) may appear in the song along with the ability to present a plurality of remixed versions of the song to the end user based on pre-programmed conditions. Although such approach may provide the end user with multiple remixed versions of a song, it suffers from, among other things, the significant disadvantage of not permitting end users to remix music themselves. The approach also requires complex determinations by the recording engineer in selecting alternate recordings of individual musical instruments and determining the appropriate conditions under which a particular remix will be presented to the end user. This approach further suffers from the significant disadvantage that the end user does not control which remix is presented to her and cannot personalize it to her individual tastes.
Others have proposed allowing users to rearrange isolated instrument and vocal recordings in a digital music file (U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,686,531 and 7,232,949). These proposals require specialized equipment or software; require significant music background; are difficult to use; or some or all of the foregoing. Further, none of the prior proposals are well suited to social networking services.